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May 17, 2009

Social Derivatives & Brand Influence

It’s interesting to find how brands can be easily and more directly reflective of cultural blips simply because of the fact that new memes are much easier to discover.

For instance, Noah Kalina used his daily photos as shorthand for his own life’s journey.

The journey which the NBA co-opted for its “Where Amazing Happens” campaign. They similarly told their stories through still photography, using the same score that was originally written for Noah. The Rebel Xsi went back for round three, telling simple stories through photography with a track reminiscent of Noah’s.

Charlie Todd’s Improv Everywhere went sharesville by pausing about 200 or so agents in the middle of Grand Central station and filming the reaction.

T-Mobilespun it by giving it a theme song and a dance routine. Trident took a whack at it with the far less successful Single Ladies flash mob (who’s failure is probably a subject for another post).

I would call these executions Social Derivatives, marked by a semi-obscure creative influence while seamlessly using familiarity to breed favorability.

These social derivatives form a sort of tacit reverse sponsorship. Or a shorthand to say a brand’s human alter-ego might be into the same things the audience is into, while equally reflecting something new, exciting and mostly undiscovered by the mass.

So it’s great when brands can create their own cultural contexts, but it’s very difficult for most brands/people/things to be unabashedly original all of the time. At the very least, most things are borrowed most the time.

But we can use our much larger distributional platforms, our big brand voices, to bring these small interesting pieces of content/conversations/experiences and help them find new audiences who are prone to appreciate them, while giving a nod to all the folks the original material met along the way.